FILM REVIEW: DARK DAYS

FILM REVIEW: DARK DAYS; Nightmare Society of Wrecked Urban Lives

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: August 30, 2000

If you asked a sampling of middle-class New Yorkers to describe their worst nightmare, more than a few might reply that it would be to find themselves indigent and homeless on the city's streets. But as Marc Singer's remarkable documentary film ''Dark Days'' illustrates, even the worst nightmare can have descending levels of horror.

Most of this unforgettable movie was filmed below the streets of Midtown Manhattan in a dank Amtrak railway tunnel where a colony of around 75 homeless put down roots, some for as long as 25 years, among the rats and the garbage. (Since the filming was completed three years ago, the community has been dispersed.) If any urban setting conjures up an image of the bowels of hell, surely this is it. And ''Dark Days'' records it in stark black-and-white pictures that stir the most primal fears of subsisting in a world without light.

To make ''Dark Days,'' which opens today at the Film Forum, Mr. Singer made the ultimate journalistic commitment. He went underground himself for two years and lived side by side with the tunnel dwellers, who became his film crew as well his subjects. As ''Dark Days' introduces around a dozen people who have chosen to live underground, it is apparent that they are a particularly hardy breed of the dispossessed.

Although a railway tunnel may seem like pits of hell, its denizens insist that their environment allows them far more freedom and dignity than a life spent being shuttled among the city's homeless shelters where thievery and disease are rampant. And in a sadly grotesque parody of above-ground middle-class life, a number of them proudly exhibit their ingeniously improvised ''houses.''

These dwellings are jerry-built shacks made of scrap metal, sheet plastic and plywood, and are outfitted with discarded furniture and even carpeting. Electricity comes from illegally tapping into city supplies. Some residents cook with hot plates, others on small campfires. Some even have pets and television sets. The film largely skirts the issue of sanitation, although one scene shows two residents emptying the contents of a communal toilet in a far corner of the tunnel.

Most of the residents make a living of sorts by foraging above ground during the day, collecting bottles and cans for recycling and peddling junk on the streets. (One peddler claims that the fastest selling items on the street are gay pornography magazines.) Many meals are gleaned from restaurant garbage. Some of the most unsettling images show rats foraging (and sometimes competing with the residents) for sustenance. And more than one sequence pointedly compares the scuttling rodents with the human scavengers who must constantly keep them at bay. Most of the residents (about 80 percent, one man estimates) are crack addicts.

''Dark Days'' manages the tricky feat of humanizing its subjects without overly sentimentalizing them. Those who verbally own up to their crack addiction take responsibility for their wrecked lives. In the most poignant first-person vignette, Dee, a toughened woman in her mid-50's (and one of the only women in the community) tearfully recalls the deaths of her two children in an apartment fire while she was immobilized by crack. In the film's one example of strife among the community residents, her shelter is destroyed by an arsonist for reasons that are never given.

Those who appear in the movie cross ethnic boundaries and range in age and background from Tommy, a young man barely out of his teens who fled an abusive home in South Carolina, to Henry, a railroad and construction worker in his mid-60's who is the community's electrician. The closest thing to a town philosopher is Ralph, who is in his mid-40's and is raising two pet dogs. In his anguished confession, Ralph, who has kicked his crack habit, regretfully tells of a 5-year-old daughter who was raped and mutilated while he was in jail.

But as grim as it gets, ''Dark Days'' largely shies away from depicting the most hellish aspects of subterranean life. We witness touching displays of grief and sorrow and many flashes of a gritty streetwise humor. But insanity, despair and maniacal drug-induced behavior and violence are barely suggested. When the community is dispersed, the residents tearing down their homes seem not much different from a happy family pulling up stakes at a campsite.

The movie's abrupt, happily-ever-after ending feels tacked on and false. When Amtrak sent armed police to break up the community, Mr. Singer called on the Coalition for the Homeless to intervene, and the organization struck a deal with the federal government to provide housing vouchers for the tunnel residents. The final scenes show several of the residents, who have successfully completed drug rehab programs, blissfully settling into immaculate new apartments and beginning new lives. Starting over, even under the rosiest of circumstances is never that easy.

DARK DAYS

Directed by Marc Singer; director of photography, Mr. Singer; edited by Melissa Neidich; music by DJ Shadow; produced by Mr. Singer and Ben Freedman; released by Palm Pictures and Wide Angle Pictures in association with the Sundance Channel. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village, (212) 727-8110. Running time: 84 minutes. This film is not rated.